We all know the goody two-shoeses of the world got piles of candy in their stockings, while the downright rotten kids got a cookout in a dirty tube sock. What about the rest of us—the subtly subversive, secretly devious and sporadically mischievous? We’re the ones who ended up with stuff like these actual, bizarre excerpts from my stockings of Christmasses past.

Santa had great hopes for my future as a fringe athlete, but, sad to say, I let him down. Try as I might, I couldn’t even manage to get a Yomega automatic yo-yo (http://yomega.com) to do more than just yo. I got a lot of mileage out of my Klutz Foxtail (http://klutz.com), until someone told me it was a remarketed dog toy. Inspired by tales that the Aerobie frisbee (http://aerobie.com) was so well engineered that someone once threw it across the Niagara gorge, I promptly flung it into Lake Erie. (N.B.: They don’t float.)

Santa hedged his bets with toys that provided hours of engineering fun. A geodesic dome construction kit taught me an early appreciation of the works of R. Buckminster Fuller and the subtle differences between a dodecahedron and a truncated icosahedron, but its application in the fields of fun- and mayhem-making remained unclear. The BRIO train set (http://brio.net) was better received, and had it not been for insufficient investment capital, would likely have become the primary mode of transportation between the Lego Spaceport (http://lego.com) in Kitchenville and the Lincoln Log (http://lincolnlogs.knex.com) frontier town of Living Room Gulch.

They say Santa sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake. He probably also watches you when you’re making a complete fool of yourself, which would explain the selection of games he gave me. Tuba Ruba involved knotting yourself up in a hollow plastic tube, and then trying to get a marble from one end of the tube to the other. The ensuing improvisational acrobatics were made more difficult by constant laughter and sarcasm from the peanut gallery. Equal parts buffoonery and aggression therapy, Bean Ball required the players to don neon orange, velcro bonnets and throw soft fuzzy balls at each others’ heads. There was a way of awarding points, but the only winners in the room were the spectators.

But all this pales in comparison to the best Christmas gift I ever got. It was Christmas morning, and we were sitting around the living room in our pajamas, knee-deep in wrapping paper. Christmas carols played softly on the radio, and the smell of eggs benedict came wafting in from the kitchen. Little spazzo Davie had one last gift to open before breakfast. Heavy, solid, didn’t rattle. I slowly peeled back the wrapping paper and my face lit up. “Wow! This is the best Christmas ever!” Beneath the wrapping: 500 pieces of blank typing paper.

Dave Kleinschmidt really likes office supplies.